Schevill — Studies in Cervantes. 481 



teentli eentiiiy readers, and the story of Aeneas's hardships would 

 be readily looked upon as a real novelet cle aventuras, in spite of any 

 absence of intimite, that is, of those bourgeois qualities which 

 chiefly distinguish a Renaissance story of adventure — such, for 

 instance, as the Persiles — from the heroic epic of antiquity. 



Let us see noAv how widespread acquaintance with the works of 

 Virgil was, and consequently how common the imitation of some 

 features of his epic or the borrowing of some of its sentiments. The 

 testimony here adduced, though far from complete, ought to show 

 that among Spanish poets, dramatists and novelists alike, from the 

 middle of the fifteenth century through the age of Cervantes, the 

 Aeneid was especially well known ; allusions to it in some form or 

 other can be found wherever the reader may turn. 



During the fourth decade of the fifteenth century the Marques 

 de Santillana^ wrote to his son, Don Pero Gonzalez de Mendoza, 

 then studying at the university of Salamanca : 



A ruego e instangia mia (about 1417), primero que de otro 

 alguno, se han vulgaricado en este reyno algunos poemas, asy como 

 la Eneycla de Virgilio . . . e muchas otras cosas, en que yo me 

 he deleytado, fasta este tiempo e me deleyto, e son asy como un 

 singular reposo a las vexagiones e trabajos que el mundo continua- 

 niente trahe, etc. 



For the purposes of the present study, this testimony may be 

 considered the earliest landmark of Virgil's influence on Spanish 

 literature. In the Marques de Santillana, however, the foremost 

 poet of a courtly school of verse, Virgil is reflected but indirectly; 

 the Aeneid, like other works of the ancients whom the Marques had 

 read only in translation, was to him largely a bookish love inspired 

 perhaps at the outset by the eulogy of the Divina Commediar But 

 the part of the Latin Epic which attracted the Spanish poet seems to 

 have been the romance of Dido and Aeneas.'^ 



Another work by a member of the Court of John II, the 

 Trezientas del famoso poeta Juan de Mena, with glosses by Fernan 



^ Cf. Amador de los Rios, Oiras de Don Inigo Lopez de Mendoza, Marques 

 de Santillana, etc. (Midi id 1852), pp Ixxxiii of vida and 482; Mario 

 Schiff, La Bibliotheque dii Marquis de Santillane (Paris, 1905), p. 89 ff. 



- Cf. Ohras, op. cit.. p. 5 ; p. 394, Dido in Hell as in Dante's Inferno, 

 V, 61-2. 



= Cf. op. cit., pp. 195, 279, 333, 364, 371, 394, wliile 433 seems to refer 

 to Ovid's Heroides. 



